Salute to the Sea
by raedbard
Summary: Underdetermined timeline: post'New Moon Rising': It's all, as a wise man said, about the journey. Isn't it?


Author: Raedbard  
Fandom: BtVS  
Rating: Oh, I don't know. Mentions of m/m sex but everything's in a sepia-toned flashback and is unlikely to maim young minds.  
Characters: Oz, also Giles. With Giles/Oz.  
Timeline: I find these pretty hard to work out with G/O, so I'm being very lax with them here. After 'New Moon Rising' but assuming an established relationship between Giles and Oz some time in s2-4. shrugs  
Summary: It's all, as a wise man said, about the journey. Isn't it? (NB. Assumes that Oz's transformations have resumed after NMR.)

SALUTE TO THE SEA

_First Stage_

Light to dark and day to day, Oz journeys. Movement, but for the steady ebb and flow of the yoga asanas which feel more like breathing than any exercise, ceased some time ago. Heartbeats and knee creaks and piercing cries of the winter-white birds of Tibet are his only soundtrack and whenever he misses the sea that shaped the travel, he seeks the snow. He thrusts in his hands, melting the cold, since snow, the clean sweet-tasting snow on the mountains, is just another form for the water. And indoors, away from the sky, the asanas give him back the air and the sea in warm breath through a body in flux.  
_  
Second Stage_

_  
_Coming here again, twice as lost, had been long, stretching and difficult - full of a hundred petty steps and elaborate ways to foil the moon. He had ditched the van someplace where it was possible he might see it again and reclaim it, if he ever came back, and began to rely on the autonomy of others by stowing away on the first great ship he saw. He stays below, hiding behind steel doors, tracing the word _Newcastle_, that cold place in England where the ship came from, with his fingers, until they change, half-hearted.

_Third Stage_

Sometimes, he goes backwards. As if in a conscious dream where the lycanthropy surges, he thinks in flesh and smell: the skin of girls whose names he knows he has not forgotten but just isn't himself enough to recall (_livin' groupie-free nowadays_), and the two others who never seem to leave him. Swimming in the confusion of his wolf-senses he thinks about Willow, sad and nakedly broken, because he can't stand to think of her happy now. And then comes the snap at the neck and the hot rush of sweet blood flooding over his tongue. He hadn't hung around to know what had happened to that other now-naked girl after he'd done.

_Fourth Stage_

The months seem to roll round too quickly during the voyage, their unnatural speed giving him the impression that the three voided night during which he is absent are stretching out to fill the empty time he has below deck, hiding from moon and sun. Nothing seems to happen and mostly he sleeps, the vitriol he has always seemed to lack as Oz now absent in the wolf nights too; the animal lessened, but not gone. The self-inflicted wounds, once dealt out in angry impotence, have now all but disappeared so that these days, when he wakes naked and re-formed there is no physical reminder, but for the persistent aching in his limbs, of what he would have glimpsed, if he had the means to see, a few short hours ago.

_Fifth Stage_

As the dreams start to wear off it is always the man he thinks of, rocking into his sunless mornings in the belly of the ship. In the man's bed - the ache in his body now reminding him of the quiet comfort he had there - mornings came bright and leisurely, with offers of tea. Oz always wished, in secret, that Giles would one day wake him with the deliciously British-sounding breakfast of tea and crumpets. He would tease without using words and coax the business of waking into a dissolve of mellow smut and butter on linen sheets. But Giles never had.

_Sixth Stage_

There is no clear recollection of time, place or person when he thinks of the man, such anchoring concepts don't fit the coming-together that they made. It was a whenever thing; pressed up against the book cage in the library with the man's strong cold fingers held fast in his own white skin is the same memory as the non-crumpets and cool linen. Sometimes Oz doubts the memories, squints at then in the dark below deck or through the rain and sea-stained porthole windows. The man doesn't beckon him back - he's gone now, lost in the water - so it is only the imperfect bleed-together of his own version of events that he has to remember him with, so he has to hope that he's doing it right.

_Seventh Stage_

One day, near the end, a vicious storm grips the ship and he wishes, for the only time, that he could go above deck and stand in the rain. Late, his full senses have retuned and are flooding him through with sensation. Below decks he arches his neck back, making it round and taut, feeling a tongue lick away sweet-tasting rare rain. They'd had to do it - who knew when they'd get another chance? So it had been Giles on his knees, stripping off a wet blue t-shirt (_Secret Lingerie_) and sucking water off his stomach in the quick dusk. So now storms, long and cumulative, spiking into bright sparks of lightning, make him remember the man too. Now all the water does.

_Eighth Stage_

Now, here, it is dry land nad no rain. The snow never seems to fall or melt but just remains - a frozen river, miles from the sea. Movement lives in his breath, in the deep heat which the asanas lend him, burning fat and sparking lust. The monks smile with inscrutable faces if he ever tries to bring it up. It's natural, they say, don't try to fight it. One more trial to re-make the man and another journey taken. But Oz spends his days in the snow, melting it in his mouth and tasting older lusts made purer by the expanse of sea between them.


End file.
